Investing in America

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I listened closely to the speech given by the Senator from South Dakota about the deficit. I was thinking as he gave the speech that it was a good one, but I think a little bit of history is warranted at this moment.

In the year 2000, 11 years ago, President William Jefferson Clinton was leaving office. We had gone through a period of budget surpluses. We were taking the budget surplus generated each year and buying more longevity in Social Security, as appropriate. It was a very positive situation. The national debt of America when President William Jefferson Clinton left office was $5 trillion. In other words, the accumulated debt of America from George Washington to the end of William Jefferson Clinton was $5 trillion. And as President Clinton left office, he said to President Bush: I want to give you, in the next year, a $120 million surplus in terms of what you can anticipate to happen in the next year.

It was a pretty positive situation with a lot of job creation, businesses doing well, homes being built.

Now fast forward from 2000 to 2008, 8 years later. Let's take a snapshot. What was the state of the economy? We were facing unemployment at record levels in numbers growing by the month. We no longer had a national debt of $5 trillion. Eight years later after President George Bush, that national debt was $12 trillion, more than doubled in an 8-year period. The obvious question is, what happened? Why were we doing so well 8 years before and had fallen so badly 8 years later?

We had two wars not paid for--we just added those to the national debt--in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had tax cuts even to the wealthiest, something that had literally never occurred in the history of the United States, and that added directly to the debt. We had programs unpaid for, signed by the President into law, very expensive programs, even in the area of Medicare. Accumulate those things with the 9/11 occurrence and the downturn in the economy, and we saw our national debt go from $5 trillion to $12 trillion. Instead of President Bush leaving new President Obama a surplus for the next year, they anticipated a $1.2 trillion deficit as President Bush left office. That is what Barack Obama inherited 24 months ago.

To hear some of the comments being made, one would think President Obama had created the deficit crisis. He inherited the deficit crisis from President George Bush. He said: The first thing we need to do is get the economy up and running. Republicans were virtually no help. Only three Republican Senators joined us in a stimulus bill which is now being mocked and criticized. But, in fact, one-third of the stimulus was in tax cuts, tax cuts to working families to help them through a recession. Another third was a safety net, unemployment insurance, as well as help to State and local governments. The final third was infrastructure, building roads and bridges and things across America for the economy. That is what the stimulus was.

Did it bring us back in a hurry from our recession? No. But it stopped the decline in our economy, and we are bringing ourselves back now as more consumer confidence is being demonstrated than we have seen in a long time.

I was a member of President Obama's deficit commission. For the record, I want people to know that that deficit commission originally was legislation. It was a statute. We were going to enact a law to give this commission the authority to come up with a report and force Congress to vote on it. Powerful stuff, with a lot of bipartisan support. When this powerful piece of legislation came to the floor of the Senate, seven Republican Senators who were cosponsors of the bill voted against the bill that they cosponsored, this effort to try to deal with our budget deficit in honest terms. After the bill failed, the President said: I will create one by Executive order. I served on it. It was Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson cochairing an effort with 18 members. At the end of the day, 11 of us, including myself, signed on to the final report. I always added the caveat--and I think most would--that I don't agree with all of it, but I think it was the closest we were going to come to facing a terrible crisis.

The crisis is this: Out of every dollar we spend in Washington, we borrow 40 cents. That is unsustainable. Whether we are using that dollar to build a missile or to pay for food stamps doesn't make much difference. We have to borrow 40 cents for every dollar we spend. Where do we borrow the money? One of our major creditors was in town last week, President Hu Jintao of China, a major creditor and a major competitor. Which takes me to the President's State of the Union Address last night.

The Republicans are fixed on one particular area. They believe the sum and substance of all that we do in Washington should be focused on the deficit. I think the deficit is critically important. I voted for the deficit commission report. We have to do things that are unpopular and we have to do them in a sensible and timely way. But it isn't the whole story. What the President tried to remind us last night is that we also have a great American economy. We have to ask ourselves: Will that economy be able to compete in the world of the 21st century? How will we do against competitive nations such as China and Japan and Germany? Those were questions asked by the President last night.

I have heard many Republican Senators and Congressmen since say those investments, that spending, we don't need. What we need is to focus on the deficit.

I think the President got it right. The President is calling for balance, responsible deficit reform, and investment in America that makes a difference in who we are and what we can be. The President talked about the Sputnik moment, long before the Presiding Officer was born, the Sputnik moment, October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik into outer space. It scared us to death. Here this nemesis of the United States in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, with the capacity to develop a bomb that could destroy major parts of America, was now in outer space and we were not. They had a missile that launched a satellite. It was a tiny little thing, about the size of a basketball. It circled the Earth. At that time in October of 1957, a chill set in on Capitol

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Hill when people got to thinking, maybe we are not as good as we thought when it comes to math and science and education, if the Russians beat us into outer space.

Congress did something in 1958 in response to that that was historic and considered radical at the time. Congress came up with something called the National Defense Education Act. It was the first time in the history of the country when we had offered college loans to those other than veterans, and it was a program that was going to reach across America and try to put more young people in college. Did it work? Look at the numbers. In 1940, 15 percent of college age students went to college, about a half a million students in college. In 1958, we started the loan programs. By 1960, the number of college age students in college had grown to 3.5 million. Two years later I was one of them.

Now fast forward 10 more years to 1970. By 1970, 7.5 million students in America were in college. Forty percent of college age students were going to college. The investment of this government into the National Defense Education Act and student loans democratized higher education, dramatically increasing the number of students in colleges and universities, and not only prepared us for a man on the Moon and NASA but prepared our economy for more important things to come.

Let me give an example. When Sputnik was circling the globe, our scientists were sitting there upset and frustrated that the Russians were the first in space. Up in Baltimore, there were two scientists at a laboratory, and they decided they would try to track the Sputnik satellite. The Russians, in order to prove they were actually doing something, were emitting a signal from this satellite, this little basketball-sized satellite. These scientists said: Let's see if we can find that signal, the frequency. They did. Then they used--and I will get lost here in a hurry because I am a liberal arts lawyer--the Doppler effect to determine where the satellite was circling the globe and its speed. They told some people at the Department of Defense what they had found. The Department of Defense challenged them and said: If you can tell us where the satellite is and how fast it is moving, could you reverse that equation? We would like to know if we had a satellite in outer space whether we could figure out where your radio receiver was. So they did the calculations and did the work, and they determined it.

The purpose in asking the question was so that we could reach a point in national defense when, if the Russians launched a missile with a bomb on it toward the United States, we could tell where it came from and launch one in return. We did this calculation, and we started the development of this in 1958, where we could figure out where the receiving station was on Earth, if there was a transmitting satellite. If it sounds as if it might have led to something, it did. It led to a situation today where I can carry in my pocket a BlackBerry which has a GPS. GPS came out of that calculation. Now someone can basically determine where Durbin is by where his cell phone is. That has become common technology and science, but it was

research by the Federal Government that led us 50 years later to this moment.

I say that because the President was trying to make that point last night. When it comes to the future of our economy and where we will be and whether we will be competitive, we need to invest--it is not a bad word, it is a good word--in our country: in people so they have the education and training, so they can compete; in businesses so they have basic research and the kind of incentives for innovation so they can move forward in growing their businesses and increasing the number of employees; and in building the infrastructure of America that makes a difference.

There was a company a few decades ago that became very popular named Lands End. Most people know it. It has since sold to Sears. They own it today. But when Lands End was thriving, it was located in a small town in Wisconsin. A lot of people wondered how they could run a big mail order operation out of a small town in Wisconsin. The answer was they had put together enough infrastructure that it worked. There were enough highways and enough ways to provide their product by mail and other delivery all around the United States.

Now we are in a new generation of challenges. That generation is calling for technology. The President talked about advancing the technology of computer reach to make sure we have high speed computer accessibility across the United States. That technology, innovation, and education is going to build a platform for us to be competitive. I think the President got it right. We deal honestly with the deficit, but we don't do it so quickly that we make the recession worse. And we invest in our people so that we are ready to compete in the 21st century.

I yield the floor.

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